Mick Eve, sax player for Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, was mooching around the musical instrument shops in London’s Denmark Street as one did in 1966. His friend Chas Chandler, whom Mick had known as bassist for the Animals but who had recently returned from a talent-fishing trip to America, ran out of a guitar store and said excitedly in broad Geordie: “Mick, Mick! You got to come and hear this bloke play; I found him in New York!”

“I don’t need to go into the shop, Chas,” replied Mick in droll Cockney, “I can hear ’im from ’ere,” which he certainly could – a restlessly remarkable, eerily savage sound emanating from within. This was the afternoon of 22 September 1966, Jimi Hendrix’s first full day in England.

Eve’s is one of the many stories not included in the biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, narrating the life of unarguably the greatest guitarist and blues magician of all time, as he left New York for London.

Hendrix had arrived aboard a Pan Am flight, little known in his own country and a stranger to London. He had been born of Native and African-American blood in Seattle to a poor father who cared moderately for his son and a mother whom he adored but barely knew, and who died when Jimi was fifteen.

He had joined the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to avoid a jail sentence for car theft (under a judge’s ruling) but hated the army immediately. A regimental report read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations.” It is important, says Paul Gilroy, a historian of black culture, to see Hendrix as an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace.

Hendrix collected a small coterie of dazzled admirers in New York, among them John Cale of the Velvet Underground who, after playing a concert with Patti Smith in Paris last week, recalled going down into a dive bar in Sullivan Street to see Hendrix play during the mid-60s. “There was this fella heckling him all the way through, giving him gyp until Hendrix said, ‘I see we’ve got Polly Parrot in the house tonight.’ He got no trouble after that.”

Hendrix also amazed Chandler at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village one night, enough to fly him to London where the hunger for blues was inexplicably greater than in America. “Black American music got nowhere near white AM radio,” says the man who met Hendrix at Heathrow, Tony Garland, who would manage Hendrix’s British company, Anim. “And Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

In London, Hendrix with his band Experience forged a new soundscape, stretching the blues to some outer limit of expression, ethereal but fearsome, lyrical but dangerous, sublime but ruthless. And yet, he wrote: “I don’t want anyone to stick a psychedelic label round my neck. Sooner Bach or Beethoven.”

This was not serendipitous, nor was it as effortlessly “natural,” as Hendrix himself often suggested, or even pure genius: Hendrix had found an alchemist with sound in the unlikely form of a sonic wave engineer in the service of the Ministry of Defense, Roger Mayer.

Mayer was an inventor of electronic musical devices, including the Octavia guitar effect which created a “doubling” echo. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page,” Mayer recalls at his home in Surrey, “but he said it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met: ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’”

Mayer left the Admiralty and thus began a partnership that changed the sound of sound. “And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who had been a roadie but joined the management team, “these were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic but stretched to the fucking limit.”

Mayer is fascinating on the science of the sound: “When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form. . . . The input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive . . . if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples. It depends how you throw the stone, or the wind.”

Casting this magic around working men’s clubs in the north of England, and opening for the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, Hendrix forged his furrow with what Gilroy calls “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.”

“He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way,” says Keith Altham, a reporter for the New Musical Express, who became a kind of embedded Hendrix correspondent. “And Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi, and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.”

Mozart, Handel, Bach, Mahler: influences which Hendrix listed in a collection of writings recently assembled by his friends Alan Douglas and Peter Neal to create the nearest we have to an autobiography. And appositely so, for Hendrix’s address in London, which he called “the only home I ever had,” with the only woman he ever really loved, was the same at which George Frederick Handel had resided in another era: 22 Brook St, London W1.

On the night he arrived in England, Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham, his match and lover. Her recollections are priceless: she remembers Hendrix buying music by Handel and jamming along with his guitar on the sofa. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious,” she said over dinner in London a few years ago accompanied by her husband, an Australian GP. “And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason.”

“I remember very well [Jimi] sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street; sometimes he would play a riff for hours until he had it just right. Then he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he’d got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Except perhaps Kathy too: Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary, her middle name, when she had stormed out after an argument.

Hendrix returned to America to record Electric Ladyland, during the making of which producer Eddie Kramer remembers “his wonderful, swaying dance coming off the keyboards [played by Steve Winwood], in a waltz with the guitar.” Hendrix then gave the name “Electric Ladyland” to his grand studio project in New York. And any suggestion that he had some kind of “death wish” is given the lie by his own written intentions to record there “something else – like with Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco.”

Patti Smith remembers the opening party in summer 1970, from which Hendrix himself took a break to join her on the steps outside. “He was so full of ideas,” Smith recalls, “the different sounds he was going to create in this studio – wider landscapes, experiments with musicians, new soundscapes. All he had to do was to get over to England, play the [Isle of Wight] festival, and get back to work.”

Hendrix never made it back to work. He died in the street on which I was born: Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. I’d moved a block away by the time I picked up the Evening Standard on the way home from school on 18 September 1970, flabbergasted by the news. The front-page picture showed Hendrix playing at that Isle of Wight festival less than three weeks beforehand. I’d been there; his searing cry against war, Machine Gun, was still ringing in my ears.

Back home, I changed into all white and waited for cover of darkness to go round to 22 Lansdowne Crescent, where Hendrix had died in the basement, swallowing vomit after a night out with wine, amphetamines and a German girl called Monika.

There was no one there. I took a piece of chalk out of my pocket, scrawled “Kiss the sky, Jimi” on the pavement and crossed the road to ponder the gravity of the moment and place. A man emerged and washed away my scanty tribute with a mop.

Listening to music in the car affects the way you drive, but whether it’s Bach or Eminem doesn’t matter. The trick is to choose tunes that do not trigger distracting thoughts, memories, emotions or bopping along to the beat. This takeaway message from an Israeli study was all over the Internet, US news programs and international newspapers months before it appeared in the October 2013 edition of Accident Analysis and Prevention.

The media attention has put lead researcher Warren Brodsky, director of music science research at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev, in the limelight more than any of his previous findings in music cognition and has illuminated his research path for possibly the rest of his working days. “It seems that every aspect of my career has led me down this path,” Brodsky says. The study also was notable in scientific circles because it was commissioned by the Israel National Road Safety Authority, making Israel the only country in the world to fund an investigation of how background music puts drivers at risk for distraction.

Brodsky had long been interested in this phenomenon, given that people in modern cultures listen to music more in their cars than anywhere else. “I wondered how listening to music affects driving behavior and how the car environment influences what kind of music we listen to,” he says.

In 2002, Brodsky published the first study to show that fast-paced music directly causes accelerated driving speed. “It was perhaps a small study, but it made a huge splash around the world,” he says. Indeed, his finding even merited a mention on Saturday Night Live. Comedian Tina Fey reported: “A new study shows that drivers who listen to fast tempo music while driving have more accidents, while drivers listening to slow music have sexier accidents.”

Born in Philadelphia, Brodsky moved with this family to Jerusalem at age fifteen. After high school at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, he played bass guitar with the well-known army band, the Nachal Troupe, and then returned to Rubin in 1982 to earn a bachelor’s degree in percussion and music education.

His performances for soldiers had left him intrigued as to how music affects well-being. Music therapy was not yet taught in Israel. He later became one of its pioneers by earning a master of creative arts in music therapy at Hahnemann Medical University in Philadelphia, the only graduate program of music therapy within a mental health department of a medical school.

Returning to Israel, he worked in special-ed schools, state hospitals and mental health clinics. He began training music and movement therapists at Levinsky College in Tel Aviv in 1986 and was among the first to get licensed by Israel as a creative and expressive arts therapist.

In 1992, Brodsky and his family went to England for three years so he could study toward a doctorate in music psychology at Keele University under the mentorship of the renowned John Sloboda. “I was interested in new fields like the biology of music-making, music medicine and performing-arts psychology,” he says.

His work in the UK influenced British medical associations to rethink “stage fright” as an occupational hazard, rather than a mental health weakness or social phobia, that might best treated by clinicians with a background in music. “It was important for the field that a new breed of musician, with clinical training and psychotherapeutic experience, take responsibility of how to treat performing musicians in the symphony orchestra, just as athletes might get counseling from a sports psychologist,” he says.

The research bug had bitten Brodsky, and the effects were permanent. “I couldn’t go back to the therapeutic arena after that. My heart wasn’t in the clinic, and my passion to treat patients had been replaced by a deep passion and infatuation for empirical work.” He won a post-doc fellowship at BGU in the behavioral sciences department and later became tenured as senior lecturer of music. Brodsky is the sole teacher of music courses in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In 2008, Brodsky did a proof-of-concept study commissioned by General Motors about how music might strengthen brand identity of Chevrolet and Cadillac automobiles. He has also published investigations on hand-clapping songs of elementary school children and positive aging among orchestra players. Then, in 2010, the Israel National Road Safety Authority provided funding to Brodsky for a large-scale on-the-road study involving young drivers. “It seemed like this was my calling. No one else in the world was invested in researching the effects of music on driver behavior – not from the field of music psychology or traffic safety,” he says.

Previously, Brodsky and Israeli music composer Micha Kizner, a former buddy from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Entertainment Unit, devised a program of original music carefully structured to increase driver safety and published pilot studies in the journal Transportation Research. With this CD in hand, Brodsky and co-researcher Zack Slor recruited eighty-five young drivers to drive several forty-minute trips with either their preferred cruising tracks brought from home or with the experimental CD. The results show a clear twenty percent decrease in driver errors, miscalculations and aggressive driving accompanied by the alternative background music.

“Bottom line, the car is the only place in the world you can die just because you’re listening to the wrong kind of music,” says Brodsky, who is writing a book on the topic.

“Maybe we have to educate the public at large. There is a need to raise awareness and to teach drivers new practices of everyday music consumption and how to make better choices for roadway listening. It’s a question of being more careful about preferences and exposure. In the end, it is an issue of health and well-being, not in-car entertainment.”